‘Honest Guvnor – I Never Did Nuffin’ … How Facebook Risk Alienating The People That Could Help Them Beat Google…

This edition of the Lowedown may be a bit shorter than usual … this is because, if left unchecked – there is a very real danger of it all developing into something of a rant…

It all started with a chap my ‘Minions’ (the tongue in cheek name my in-house team have given themselves) were giving a few pointers to. He was doing quite a good job of getting traffic from Facebook ads, but before they could give him the benefit of their experience to improve things even further … his Facebook advertising account was ‘permanently disabled’

The ads he was running were no different from those he had been running for several weeks, did not involve anything on the usual ‘naughty’ list – and had only ever had one ad banned months ago, for having ‘too much text in it’ (?) … in fact, looking at the email from Facebook, you can see he was actually banned for, quite literally, nothing…

As you would expect, contacting a proper, real human at Facebook can be somewhat challenging, but is nothing compared to finding someone there who will give you a straight answer to a simple question … and if any of this sounds familiar – it’s exactly the same type of ‘Because we said so…’ policy that has turned Google from being the people’s choice into being what many now consider to be something of an ‘evil empire’.

We all know the bulk advertising from the chaps that are trying to get the world addicted to Candy Crush and suchlike are what Facebook really want … but Facebook is also the place where smaller businesses are wanting to advertise to become the big businesses of the future, so treating the ‘little guy’ with such short sighted contempt now means they are hobbling their own business.

In fact, what you’ll end up with are growing businesses with massive advertising budgets – and Facebook right at the bottom of the list of people they want to work with.

It seems the online industry is one of very short memories. Just a few years ago the ‘only’ place you could really advertise was Google … but by banning a large body of people from advertising they actually created both the environment and the customers for any competitor to succeed easily just by offering an alternative advertising platform … and it seems Facebook are now doing exactly the same…

It is the considered opinion of those here at HQ, that if Facebook could get the ‘search’ part of their business sorted out … they could pose serious problems for Google, and probably even overtake them (though more on that another time, I think) – but by driving small businesses away they are making it much, much harder for themselves … and not so much building up speed as shooting themselves in the foot…